Hydra Poesis is currently in creative stasis—not dead, but resting incredibly deeply. Ideas are being pursued in other spaces, forms and collaborations. Expect this sleeping body to awaken, on or around March 6, 2019.

We said goodbye to our home for 10 years. The Centre for Interdisciplinary Arts Studios was a hub for independent arts practice and experimentation and Hydra Poesis was a founding resident company throughout its journey. Our massive thanks to pvi collective for their work leading the building and to all the peers who made it fantastically unwieldy, esoteric, generous and regularly febrile in its productive energies.

Over the last 18 months Hydra Poesis has hosted artists exploring what the internet means for performance for them. In partnership with DADAA inc (Disability in the Arts, Disadvantage in the Arts Australia) a massive range of experimental broadcasts, artworks, performances and documents were created. The project has wrapped for now but new iterations of the partnership are in the pipeline.

Didactic Tools opens in November and kicks off with a workshop Symposium for peers working in knowledge and cultural practices who want to participate in peer-to-peer exchange, explore open source practices and non-hierarchical methodologies of cultural production.

Below is information on the exhibition but head OVER HERE for info on the Workshop Symposium and to RSVP by taking our 10 minute online learning module.

Hydra Poesis and DADAA inc have partnered in a 40 week collaboration during 2015 supporting artists with intellectual disabilities to make performance and digital art for internet audiences.

With producing and on-hands support from DADAA’s Simone Flavelle and Zoe Martyn, the project is using Hydra’s reconfigured multi-camera web broadcast studio (Production Hall) and working with both Hydra artists (Sam Fox, Laura Boynes, Sete Tele) and peers within the broader CIA Studios network.

Sibling Rivers was performed in Calgary at the MS:T Festival and much thanks goes out to international collaborators Allison Wyper (USA) and Terrance Houle (Canada) and our respective local peers who worked with us including: live performances by Dani Navia and Trey Madsen, plus pre-recorded performance/video/sound contributions from Chris Dirksen, Ella-Rose Trew , Aes Tchiachovsky, Sete Tele, Erika Katrina Barbosa, Rafa Esparza, and Sebastian Hernandez.

This week 5 core artists are working on the first research period for the Didactic Tools project. Keg de Souza, Tarsh Bates and Jake Oorloff join Sam Fox and Kynan Tan to research the impact of teaching and learning culture on art, politics and knowledge itself. The artists will then run a 2 day intensive peer workshop at CIA Studios.

Hydra Poesis and CIA Studios are inviting applications for artists to participate in the DIDACTIC TOOLS workshop – a cross-disciplinary project between five national and international artists investigating knowledge culture in contemporary society.

Join the core group of international and national artists for discussions around knowledge transference, learning and instructional culture, and respond to the concepts through experimentation with original and shared work.

PROMPTER grapples with the limits of actions contained in media or the home and even theatres/art spaces themselves, and we come up against the possibilities of art and abstraction. Commentary, exposition, and journalistic reports generally run counter to the basic principles of abstraction artists employ. So we’re putting out reports that go alongside our art – reports by artists about the our local geography/politics/culture.

PROMPTER is underway at the Arts House Meat Market, North Melbourne. There’s been much media interest, including a feature by ABC Arts Online you can watch below. There’s been a string of great reviews including this one here, and perhaps our most gratifying quote is, ‘Brecht would have been proud of the emotional distancing and invitation to thoughtful engagement delivered to the audience’ by critic Ruth Richter.

29.04.2013
Activists, advocates and journalists were not permitted to visit with refugees over the three day National Refugee Rights Convergence at Yongah Hill Detention Centre 90km from Perth.

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A contingent of 18 people – dancers, journalists, technicians and curators, made the journey to the centre, interviewing refugees, advocates, activists, and mental health professionals working inside detention.

Visual dispatches from the major protest yesterday, Saturday 27 April. We saw massive over-policing. The refugees were denied visits due to ‘operational reasons’, and the convergence was denied access even to the carpark. However, we heard chanting from inside the detention centre despite the distance and via a phone call to an organiser we heard messages of thanks from the refugees of Yongah Hill.

- a group dance action facilitated by Hydra Poesis. The project features dancers and journalists based in Perth, Western Australia, supported by an international media network drawn for the dance and art world.

Dance Journalism responds to ongoing developments in citizen media, the broadening definitions of journalism*, and the growing tactics and vocabulary of social and political movements.

Hydra’s short film Liberty In The Dark just took out Best Experimental at the Big Mini Media Festival in Brooklyn NY. It’s very nice to get a little encouragement and the title Best Experimental looks pretty good in laurels. Congrats to the team! Once we’ve let the film do some more festivals we will release it onto the internet for your pleasure.

The Theatre Board folks at the Australia Council for the Arts have supported our desire to research and begin work on an ‘interdisciplinary libretto’ for Wikileaks the Ballet. We will be working with artists living in regions particular to Wikileaks cables. More info on collaborators to follow. But needless to say the team will be aiming to defy all expectations that the title elicits and bring a militant inquiry (action orientated, personal, political, multifaceted local-global) to the phenomenon.